Breeding a Sustainable Agriculture

Experiments under way around the planet are leading to techniques
and crop varieties good for the long term. Now,about those subsidies...

Author Wes Jackson warned us 20 years ago we’re not
getting any smarter. Critiquing modern farming in
his book Altars of Unhewn Stone, he showed us how,
in this age of overwhelming information,we’re actually
losing wisdom. So distracted are we with our
own cleverness, we don’t see that with every inch of
topsoil that erodes,with every liter of water that’s fouled,with
every farmer who leaves the land, we’re losing nature’s wisdom,
the kind we need if we are to survive.

If you don’t find Jackson’s warning alarming, consider
this: he wrote it in 1987, before the Internet. Already we were
distracted by the wrong kind of information? And this was
before spam? Pop-ups?

Jackson, for one, has fortunately not spent these years
clicking on celebrity trivia ads. Instead he’s been making good
on a promise he made in Altars: to devise a better way to grow
food. Even though the current agricultural model renders
higher yields than ever before, this productivity comes at a
prodigious price. Jackson would like a system that can feed us
well into the future without destroying, depleting, or contaminating
its raw materials.

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